


Petaluma

by Jintian



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Abduction, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2000-06-14
Updated: 2000-06-14
Packaged: 2017-10-29 20:23:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/323828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jintian/pseuds/Jintian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scully in the white light, pre-"One Breath."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Petaluma

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sophiahelix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophiahelix/gifts).



> Thanks and appreciation go to Alanna for the Faulknerian beta, to LizardChyck for general eddy-cay-shun, and to Musea for the medicine.

  
When the bright light came down.

When it came down I thought for half a second, just half, that it was Heaven. Not even enough time to blink an eye. Then I realized that the sound drumming the air was a chopper, even though for that half second, that briefest moment, I fancied it was the heartbeat of God.

Our priest used to say, the heart of the Creator was home. But I was not going home, and as far as I knew I would never see home again.

It is cold here, Mulder. Something beats, but not a heart. I think engine, I think machine, I think motion.

This will not be a linear tale.

*

My brother Charles failed the fourth grade. I remember my parents called a meeting with all of us, and Charles sat on the davenport with his ears flushed red, and my mother cried. Not loudly, but with tears leaking down her cheeks.

We, as the older siblings, were assigned tutoring duties. I was to make sure he expanded his reading material. I let him look at my science books, my _National Geographics_. He loved the pictures  
of the lions.

Lions in the golden grass of the savanna. He used to crawl the floors of the house, growling. Sometimes, I would get down and growl with him. The lioness.

"Lions have big hearts for hunting," Charles told me. "Animals with little hearts, they're the ones that get eaten."

*

I used to think my daughter would be dark-haired. I thought I would grow up to meet the mysterious stranger, to let him sweep me off my feet or vice versa. Above all he would not be a military man, because I hated moving.

Moving almost every year, we picked up roots and we left homes and we made new ones. I think I grew taller but then I hit five feet and began to slow down.

So I thought, well, when I meet this mysterious stranger, I'll simply look up.

*

For a year I looked up at you, and for a year I trailed nearly every step you took. You would follow your intuition, wherever it led, and I would follow you because --

Because.

They say curiosity killed the cat, and Mulder, I think it could be true. It isn't God, it isn't home, and what if I'm just lying here with my eyes left open and dead? They will stare into the white expanse until the universe crumbles to pieces.

I wonder what you are staring at, wherever you are. I wonder if this is what you have been searching for all of these years, and if I have finally found it.

But then, if I can wonder, can I be dead?

*

I used to follow you everywhere, even though we looked at Truth from opposite corners of the room. You forced me up from where I sat and held my face to the wall, where the seal of Justice hung. You pointed to the tarnish and traced the cracks with your fingers.

Mulder, you are like Richard the Lion-Heart, donning armor and sailing for some holy land to battle what you think are infidels. Your crusade is conversion, is awakening the world to the presence of the devil amongst us.

I watch you from my tower, the ordered stronghold I have built from push and backbone. And yet I have wanted, at times, to leap from my window to join you. I would defy gravity -- with your faith, I could bend the rules of science.

Bend. I have bent and bent from the very first. You and your basement, your cave of hidden treasures. Some fire of yours, some magnetic pull that draws me out of shape. All of my straight lines going to curves.

The scale of Justice has tilted to one side.

*

What's happened to me?

I think they have taken my eyes and replaced them with glass. I lie here prone in the great emptiness of the light and oh, the light has seeped through my skin.

I see people in this wash of winter, and now they are my family, and now they look like -- strangers. It is stranger and stranger, the world that beats cold and white in my vision.

The strangers hide their faces. Surgical masks, hair covers. I remember those were my armor once, when I taught the secrets of the body.

What of my nakedness now? Have I lost the ability to speak?

*

At age sixteen Charles dropped out of high school. My old magazines lay in boxes, in leftover ashes in our fireplace. It was long since we had crawled and growled on the floor. I used to look at him, caught in the grind of texts and numbers, and wonder what he was hunting.

Two years passed. We moved, we picked up roots. And Charles put his down again without us, in a sun-dried California town called Petaluma. That was the last I knew. He has faded since, into the unknown. Into the abyss of America and all the devilish life a holy land conceals.

Melissa has disappeared as well, lost from us somewhere on the West coast. Roaming runs in my family, I suppose. Sometimes we would go for weeks without a word from my father. Were it not for this light I could picture my brother Bill on a stretch of ocean, everything merging into sky.

*

What happens to missing people?

*

Mulder, I think I have not blinked since I last opened my eyes, and that was an eternity ago.

Mulder, your crusade -- your battle for the holy land. There are no infidels where you seek them. There is no princess taken from her Vineyard castle.

Those are here. They are here in the place of forgetting, in the white light that is no one's home.

*

My mother's voice trembles when she cries. I have heard it happen twice.

I'm losing family members one by one. Their faces fade and vanish with each passing year. There have been no new Scullys made.

I have always thought my daughter would be dark-haired.

*

Let there be light, the Creator once said. His heart is home, and I am not there. I do not need Mulder's truth to know it. Not in this coldness, this sweeping vacuum of eyes open and unblinking. It is nowhere in my vision.

I may never be the lioness again. The light is too bright. Therefore I say now, let there be dark.

Let there be dark.

Let there be dark.


End file.
